We're Closer to the Edge Than We Think

by Kelpie Wilson

t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 27 February 2004
www.truthout.org

It has been interesting to watch the media reaction to a report commissioned by Pentagon security analysts on worst case scenarios for global climate change. The report would never have seen the light of day if it had not been leaked to the business magazine Fortune. Three weeks after the report was covered in Fortune, the British Observer covered it again, unleashing a spate of Internet news stories but very little coverage in US major dailies or TV news. What coverage there was tended to downplay the study's scenarios as "extremely unlikely."

Yet the study itself calls the risk of abrupt climate change "uncertain and quite possibly small."

The scenario examined by the report is one that has been known for years. Greenland ice cores document its occurrence several times over the past 15,000 years when the planet warmed naturally following the last ice age. It all has to do with salt. Cold salt water in the North Atlantic sinks and starts a circulation loop called the thermohaline conveyer that eventually brings the warm Gulf Stream up north. This ocean current keeps both North America and Europe warmer than they would otherwise be. Especially Europe. If you look on a map you'll see that Barcelona is at about the same latitude as Boston and we know which one is warmer.

As temperatures rise and ice melts, ocean salt water is diluted with fresh water. The cold water doesn't sink and the warm water stops flowing northward. A hundred year mini ice age gripped Europe 8,200 years ago when North American ice sheets melted and suddenly flooded the ocean with fresh water, shutting down the conveyer. The Pentagon report simply assumes a repeat of that event and analyses the impact on civilization. It is not pretty.

Ever since humans invented agriculture and civilization, the climate has been relatively benign. "Modern civilization has never experienced weather conditions as persistently disruptive as the ones outlined in this scenario," says the Pentagon report.

Given the fact that this shutting down of the Gulf Stream has occurred many times in the past, why would so many rush to label the report "extreme" and "alarmist"? It is probably more a matter of when, not if, a climate event like this will occur.

More alarming even than this particular scenario is how precarious our situation is right now. The report acknowledges that we are already on the edge of global carrying capacity. Carrying capacity is an ecological term for the ability of the environment to feed and support a population. From the report: "...global demand for oil will grow by 66% in the next 30 years but it's unclear where the supply will come from. Clean water is similarly constrained in many areas around the world. With 815 million people receiving insufficient sustenance world wide, some would say that as a globe, we're living well above our carrying capacity..."

There is a reasonable, plausible possibility that carbon induced global warming will lead to an abrupt regional ice age in the northern hemisphere with Europe the most affected. But the Pentagon has already stated that it will not be passing this report up the line to Rumsfield. You can be sure that the Bush administration will not act in any way on this threat. Perhaps it will be W's revenge on "old Europe."

The take home message on the Pentagon report comes from Peter Drekmeier, co-founder of Environmentalists Against War, who notes: "It appears that the only weapon of mass destruction to be found in Iraq is oil."